3
April
2012
The economy of gaming, like probably any economy, functions according to the principles of “general” and “restricted economy”. On the one hand, there is the phantasm (or the promise) of “free (or radical) play” – difference unleashed. On the other, there are the reality principles, the “structures” or “rules” without which no game would actually be playable. This aporia – highlighted in Derrida’s work ever since “Structure, Sign, and Play…” – sets out the playground so to speak of what is thinkable, not just within “game studies”, but it certainly seems to inform the foundational debate between “ludologists” and “narratologists”. This paper, however, does not wish to revisit what has by now probably become a stalemate, but, instead, returns to some “earlier” theoretical questions about the relationship between play, reality and simulation. It will attempt to reconceptualise and recontextualise the debate about the ethics, politics and aesthetics of (digital) games in the light of two related developments which I would call digitalization and posthumanization. What role do (digital) games play in the transition from an “analog” mediascape to a global(ised) digital and simulational “network”? What effects of remediation can be seen at work in this transition – an aspect that seems to me to have been somewhat neglected in the ludology/narratology debate? What kind of “posthumanist” subjectivities and “reading” practices are thinkable under these conditions, now that “our” more than five-hundred-year-old forms of “literacy” might be giving way to what Gregory Ulmer refers to as “electracy”?
Bio
Stefan Herbrechter is Reader in Cultural Theory (Department of Media, School of Art and Design, Coventry University, UK). He studied English and French at Heidelberg University, and English literature and Critical & Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. He is series editor of Critical Posthumanism (Rodopi) and author and editor of a number of books on a variety of aspects in English and comparative literature, critical & cultural theory, continental philosophy, cultural and media studies. He is also a translator of cultural theory/philosophy from French into English (Derrida, Cixous, Stiegler).
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3
April
2012
The irresolvable paradox of intellectual property has a long history, however due to the technological, economic, legal and cultural developments that have taken place since the mid-1990s, it has taken centre stage within the ‘information society.’ Whilst the notion of property helps to borrow legitimacy from the quasi-natural right to material property, its enforcement increasingly conflicts with another central category of the knowledge economy: creativity. Where creation and innovation rely on access to and the use of protected works, proprietary rights stifle new creation and innovation. Therefore, particularly art practices that are based on the use and re-working of pre-produced and copyrighted material bring into effect the paradoxes of intellectual property. Sollfrank explores and performs these paradoxes in her practice-led research, using the famous Warhol Flowers as an exemplary case.
Bio
Cornelia Sollfrank is a postmedia conceptual artist and researcher and writer. After her training in Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg (1987-1994), she started to explore the worldwide communication networks by transferring artistic strategies of the classical avant-gardes into the digital medium. Against the backdrop of gender-specific and institution-critical approaches, Sollfrank has continued the anti-modernist challenging of authorship, authenticity and originality in the digital environment and considers appropriation to be a central strategy of digital cultural production. This also led to her research in the field of copyright and art. In 2011 Sollfrank completed her practice-led interdisciplinary research at Dundee University, Scotland, and published her PhD thesis with the title Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property.
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1
February
2012
Dr Houghton is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. Her co-edited book Nexus: New Intersections in Internet Research (Peter Lang, 2011) brings together collaborative research from the alumni of the 2009 Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme, and she is currently co-editing a volume on flows of online control and resistance. Her research interests include public sphere theory, online activism, digital politics and rights, and the digital divides.
In this talk, given as part of the Open Media series and the Creative Activism Class at Coventry University, she discusses the web blackout that took place on 18/01/12. On this day numerous websites, including Wikipedia and Google, ‘blacked out’ in protest against the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA) currently being heavily lobbied for within the US political context. This massive online protest will have been many netizens’ first encounter with the #blackout form; however, it is borrowed from previous ‘digital rights’ campaigns in other locations. In 2009, ‘the lights went out’ all over the New Zealand internet as NZ and international netizens participated in the ‘NZ internet blackout’, a ‘performative hacktivist’ campaign (Samuel 2004) that catalysed viral online protest against the threatened domestic implementation of ‘3-strikes’ or graduated response-style anti-filesharing legislation. Despite the eventual passing of the legislation (albeit in much-modified form), the blackout garnered extensive global participation, illustrating the latent counterhegemonic power inherent in hacktivist campaigns.
This presentation interprets the blackout through a critical discourse analysis and a public sphere theoretical framework built upon the radical or agonistic tradition. It shows that socially-mediated counterpublicity can generate successful counterhegemonic projects and even bring about legislative change, and in doing so, makes the argument that our understanding of what the modern public sphere is should allow for more unruly forms of democratically legitimate communication.
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12
January
2012
Open Art, or What could Open Art mean? - Round table discussion with Elly Clarke (Coventry University), Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins (Independent artists) and James Wallbank (Access Space Sheffield).
Elly Clarke (Artist/Curator)
Elly Clarke is an artist, photographer and curator/founder of Clarke Gallery in Berlin, but which is currently mobile, or one, could say homeless! She is interested in the impact of mobility (of people, information and things) upon sense of self, both when alone and as part of a community. She produced internationally recognized documentary projects such as Moscow to Beijing (exhibited in Helsinki, Moscow, Milton Keynes, London & New York) and the Broadway House Photo Project. Next up atMeter Room will be THE MOBlLlTY PROJECT, a traveling show that launched this summer at Galerie SUVl LEHTINEN in Berlin and will find its way to Coventry in January. Her first travelling exhibition,WUNDERKAMMER, is also currently on show at TROVE in Birmingham.
Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins (Independent artists)
Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins are two artists/organisers working collaboratively since 2006 across a number of experimental disciplines, communicative channels and media. They are currently based at Static Gallery where over the last year they have been developing an ongoing series of projects around free and self-initiated education. They approach their art practice as a means of political agency through which to interrogate and re-imagine the systems, spaces, institutions and situations of contemporary urban life.
James Wallbank (Access Space Sheffield)
For more than a decade James has developed and led action research exploring the impacts of creative digital engagement on personal, community and economic development. He works to shape ethical relationships with technology which are environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. Currently he is CEO of Access Space Network, an organisation which provides the UK’s longest running free, open media lab. He works locally and internationally to seed similar creative digital communities. James has worked on projects with Oxford E-Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University’s Culture, Communications and Computing Research Institute (C3RI), Sheffield University’s Interdisciplinary Research in Socio-Digital Worlds (IRiS) Centre and “Imagination” at Lancaster University. He has authored several influential documents, including “Lowtech Manifesto” (1999), “Grow Your Own Media Lab” (2008) and “The Zero Dollar Laptop” (2010) which have spawned transnational networks of practice. James works with diverse groups, including young people, adults in danger of social and economic exclusion, people with disabilities, artists, designers, asylum seekers, professionals and technical experts. He is a frequent presenter at research conferences, universities and digital media festivals and delivers technical training for enterprises and community organisations. He has an MA in Art & Design and is a self-taught LPIC1 Engineer.
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10
January
2012
It is often claimed that networked media, and in particular the internet, has democratized the production of information and culture. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is repeatedly used to exemplify how new open models of production, notably peer-production, are radically changing the the way we think about content producers and consumers. In this talk, I will critically examine definitions of peer-productions suggested in scholarly literature. The examination will draw on a range of published empirical research on peer-production providing evidence suggesting that the openness of peer-production is not unlimited. On the basis of this, I will present preliminary findings from my study of independent film making in the Wreckamovie.com community. More specifically, by discussing the trajectory of the crowfunding struggles of a feature length Wreckamovie production, I will question the ideas of peer-productions as being non-proprietary, and existing in an open non-market driven sphere independent from traditional cultural industries.
Bio
Isis Amelie Hjorth is an AHRC funded doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. In her PhD research, she examines the emergence of cultural peer-production in the domain of independent film making. Questioning some of the utopian visions of the transformative powers of peer-production dominating discourses in new media research, she seeks to contribute towards a more nuanced understanding of distributed forms of cultural production. Alongside her studies, Isis is engaged in an NESTA/AHRC/Arts Council UK funded research project investigating the consequences of the uptake of digital tools for theatrical production. A firm believer in interdisciplinarity, Isis holds a MSc in Technology and Learning (University of Oxford), as well as a BA and MA in Rhetoric from her native Copenhagen. Before embarking on the route towards an academic career, she worked in the media sector as a journalist at a Danish TV production company, and made a debut as a playwright.
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20
December
2011
The links between the university system and broadcasting have rarely been analysed. Universities began as media studies – as theological training schools for the medieval church: that dominant broadcasting system which, from its centralized hub, crafted and produced a single doctrine, carried through its technologies – the monasteries, manuscripts and pulpits – for mass consumption by a captive population. Though universities grew in secularity and independence over the following centuries they followed the same model of informational production and distribution; a model most fully realized with the growth of mass education from the late 19th century. From then until the new millennium a specialist institution and centralized, bureaucratic organisation would control the production and distribution of knowledge, with its experts mass-distributing its message to consumers through its lectures and texts: mass society, mass education and mass media were intimately related. This paper, therefore, asks what happens when that age is over. What happens in a post-broadcast era defined by new alignments of productive, distributive and consumer power? What happens to disciplines in an age when the ability to discover, create, share, debate and legitimate information and ideas has changed so fundamentally? How can academic pedagogical and publishing practice change in the digital era? Can it cope with the open-sourcing of knowledge and is a University 2.0 even possible?
Bio
William Merrin is a Senior Lecturer in media at Swansea University. He is the author of Baudrillard and the Media (Polity, 2005) and co-editor of Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories (Routledge, 2008). In November 2006 he coined the phrase ‘media studies 2.0′ to argue for a transformation of the discipline to meet the needs of a different, digital-era. He is currently writing ‘Media 2.0′ and (with Andrew Hoskins) ‘Media Ecology/Archaeology’ for Routledge to explore these issues.
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13
December
2011
Simon King, Director of Operations and IT and one of the founding members of Imagination(www.imagination.com), the award winning global communication and brand experience agency, will be coming to Coventry University for a presentation and a Q&A about his company and his career in digital communications. Imagination has been number 1 in the Design Week Creative 100 for about 10 years.
‘With storytelling at the heart of our approach, we brought together architecture, design and content to create corporate theatre as we know it. From that foundation, we pioneered brand experience in the marketing, financial, retail and digital sectors.’
Imagination's clients include Aston Martin, Guinness, Oneworld global alliance, Disney, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Goldman Sachs, Shell and Samsung.
This Q&A with Simon King covers themes such as creative practice in the new media environment, distributed media in professional media contexts, and using the cloud in media practice
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1
November
2011
How can contemporary agricultural issues inform debates around ‘openness’ in media and cultural studies? How can these debates in turn productively ‘mediate’ agricultural struggles in the context of technoscientific knowledge production? As a way of approaching these questions, I will re-trace my own steps from new media studies to an examination of the cultural politics of an agricultural struggle, and back to new media studies via ‘open source agriculture’ as a relevant instance of the promises and challenges of ‘openness’ in a digitized world. First, I will present a sketch of my current research on Mexican ‘maize nationalism’ as it is being deployed against genetically engineered maize. Second, I will explain how my work for Living Books About Life has allowed me to unlock the cage of nationalist discourse in order to imagine different, more complex ways of resisting the enclosure of life by transnational agribusiness. Finally, I will raise the more specific question I’m concerned with at the moment: if ‘open source agriculture’ is a potential, at least partial solution to the capitalist enclosure of life, how can media and cultural studies engage with it in a critical, productive way?
Bio
Gabriela Méndez Cota is a doctoral student in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Drawing on her humanities training, she has worked on issues related to technology, such as technological blind spots in Western philosophy and the status of technology in contemporary critiques of metaphysics. More recently she has been investigating the ethical and political aspects of particular understandings of technology. Her PhD thesis develops a critical interdisciplinary approach, rooted in philosophy and media and cultural studies, to the complex relations between agricultural biotechnology and the cultural politics of Mexican nationalism.
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16
March
2011
Clare Birchall is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. She is the author of Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (Berg, 2006), co-editor (with Gary Hall) of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (EUP, 2006), and editor of a special issue of Cultural Studies (21 (1) 2007). She is the reviews editor for Culture Machine and is involved with various online projects including Liquid Theory TV, Liquid Books, and the Open Humanities Press.‘
The full title of this talk is '”If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space”: Why WikiLeaks might not be as radical as it thinks’.
Dr Clare Birchall discusses the way the ideal of open government might date back to the Enlightenment, but in recent years transparency has been given a modish inflection through its association with and dependence on e-technologies, as well as its invocation in the U.S. by Obama who has been called ‘America’s first hip president’ (Fulllwood, 2009). To go against transparency in the ‘west’ today is to be opposed to progress (conservative in the general sense); corrupt (if there is nothing to hide, why fear transparency?); or anti-democratic (the link between transparency and democracy has become unassailable). I want to try to open up a more nuanced debate in this paper. After examining transparency’s ascendance, and considering other academic critiques of transparency, I will be asking whether the left ought to be thinking about how it can appropriate the secret from the processes of (in)securitization that became a feature of the Bush administration, rather than investing wholly in transparency. The problem is not that America ‘has forgotten how to keep a secret’ as Donald Rumsfeld claimed in 2004, but that the left has forgotten to think through and with the secret; it has abandoned secrecy and its productive possibilities. The lessons and strategies of secrecy have been obscured, that is, by a moral attachment to disclosure. Recognizing this could open up a new public discourse: one that does not presume the political and moral alignments of concealment and disclosure.
The Open Media Talk series is brought to you by the Department of Media and Communication at Coventry University.
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8
March
2011
Daniel Rourke is a writer and researcher based in London. His work explores the forgotten territories of text and writing, through experiments with alternate art history, post-humanist philosophy, digital noise and fictional science. Daniel is currently undertaking a Practice-Based PhD in Art and Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Find him on the web at MachineMachine.Net
In this discussion he talks about what is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy.
The Open Media Talk Series is brought to you by the Department of Media and Communication at Coventry University.
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